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Obama Sets End of Iraq Combat For August 31st
eldavojohn writes "President Barack Obama has announced that on August 31st the United States will cease all combat operations in Iraq, although 50,000 troops will remain until the end of 2011. It's been a long seven-and-a-half years, with no guarantee of this announcement actually signifying the end of violence. Pundits are already speculating on whether or not this withdrawal speech is 'Mission Accomplished 2.' It's possibly the most significant confirmation of and commitment to a withdrawal the world will hear from the United States in Iraq."
The war, over there, has been over for years. Now, they are just working as cops. Not the type of job the military was ever cut out to do.
On the contrary. You announce the date and pull out sooner. When the little shits come out of hiding you nail them.
Real Americans don't give up so easy. A measly 7.5 years? Puhlease... If McCain had been elected we'd be there for another 7.5... along with 30 years in Iran and who knows how long on the Korean peninsula. I mean really, which party would you rather have in office?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Yeah, right! Because if you don't notice it one month ahead, then insurgents would never notice that Americans have left and will stay home. They are that dumb you know.
You make it seem as if Iraq is going to be completely undefended or something. In reality, there's the Iraqi military and police forces, right?
Let's have a little bit of faith in them, okay.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Let's hope the insurgents and other ne'er-do-wells get the message they're supposed to stop blowing people up on August 31.
From TFA: "While the US has been scaling down its troop presence in Iraq it has been stepping up its military commitment to Afghanistan, with the president ordering a surge of 30,000 additional soldiers there. " So, we're pulling our armed forces out of Iraq, just to send them to Afghanistan. A couple of nukes and they can all come home! I'm just saying...
We shouldn't have been there in the first place.
You mean when Saddam invaded Kuwait? We've 'been there' since that time. Just the level of troops and mission changed.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
You're kidding, right? It guarantees that the few remaining insurgent groups will prepare for the date, and then attack with whatever they have left.
That was the criticism in the article based on two car bombs and a drive-by killing eight in Iraq today -- the day of this announcement. I guess a better question should have been "will Iraqi security forces be able to contain the unavoidable violence following this withdrawal?"
That's why you *don't have a specific date* nor do you release your plans to the enemy.
Or perhaps you gamble and show the world that the situation is under control by releasing your "plans" of withdrawal showing that those now in charge are very capable hands. Otherwise what do you do? Sit there and then just magically disappear one day? And when that happens, you think you're not in the same scenario you just mentioned? No matter how you cut it, it's a delicate situation.
My work here is dung.
>> You announce the date and pull out sooner. When the little shits come out of hiding you nail them.
Is this a military tactic, or a birth control method?
This probably just means we can now devote more of those troops to Afghanistan. *sigh*
I wonder how much we're spending on all those troops in Germany, South Korea and Japan? Bring all the troops home from everywhere, cut the military budget in half, and we'd have no economic woes, and still have a gigantic military.
You missed the "Stuff that matters" part of Slashdot's motto up there.
I was thinking something similar (that it's easy to declare you will leave on a certain date, but hard to do it if the situation on the ground doesn't match at the time), but I think the way they are doing it is actually good.
They aren't declaring the specific date to leave, they are planning on the specific date to stop fighting. Basically on August 31st they are going to turn everything over to the Iraqi government (who at this point can probably handle anything the insurgents throw at it), but they are going to stick around, just in case. That way if the insurgents do throw everything at them, there'll still be troops around to help deal with it if they really need help. If they can handle themselves for a year, it is a sign we can safely remove the troops. The Iraqis still won't be alone, we can give them air superiority almost instantly if any insurgency gets too bad, and we can easily re-conquer the country within a month if necessary.
Obama did well on this one. Let's give him credit.
Qxe4
if bush i in iraq i had decided to push on to baghdad and topple saddam in the early 1990s after racing across the desert unimpeded, then the world would have seen that as justified
however, the political fear of americans coming home in bodybags was too much, so they turned around and left saddam in power. kuwait was liberated, saddam was cowed, end of story... not
of course, the shiites who revolted under the false impression or false covert promise of american support were massacred. and of course, the tragedy is saddam was removed when war hawks in the usa sensed the political will finally existed after 9/11 to finish the job. not that 9/11 had anything to do with saddam hussein, but it had everything to do with agendas and the willpower to get them done. the world sensed this massive disconnect and the seedy trumped up lies, and therefore did not support the americans at all the second time around
and it was done at the price of probably many more american, and iraqi, body bags, many years later, under bush ii in iraq ii
so colin powell and assorted numbnuts: you screwed up in 1991. you should have gone all the way. if you start a job, finish it completely. leaving it half done meant a problem that festered
yes, you had the highest and noblest of intentions in mind, but war is messy and has nothing to do with nobility and good intentions, and you need to take some ugly jobs to completion, or don't start the ugly job at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Guarding the oil.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
Jesus Christ. Not only are you trying to play the race card, you're trying to play it in a game of marbles.
So, we are ending "combat operations" but keeping the soldiers with guns there? It's only slightly comforting to hear that nothing has changed in the military since I got out (Only in an "at least it isn't me" way). This used to be the trick they would pull on all the missions I was on. When people get tired, just tell them it's almost over, whether it really is or not. Since I'm allowed to think now, what does an end to combat operations really mean? It sounds like they are just going to end combat pay.
Speaking as a liberal ... yes. The surge worked. I thought it would be too little, too late, and that the Washington politicians would find a way to micro-manage it into failure. I was wrong. And I'm happy I was wrong. :-) And happy to admit it. I still don't think the invasion was a good idea in the first place -- but the surge was probably the best choice that could have been made given the circumstances.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
More like just in time for the November elections...
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November 2 minus August 31 is two days?
Let me guess . . . you just graduated from high school in Texas?
So does this means the libs are admitting that the surge worked?
If by 'surge' you mean paying the Sunnis not to fight us and upping the air strikes by a factor of five so we could mostly disengage the ground troops.
But the media lost interest in it all and the public outcry over the ongoing casualties faded away, so the pro-war party got what it wanted.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So, what... The solution is for the US to stay forever?
Remember to maintain your supply of
Starting a war (even a war with collateral damage) is not a war crime; the idea of a war crime is simply to state that one's legal means to wage war is not unlimited. Deportation of entire populations for deprivation and/or genocide, for instance, is right out. To compare US conduct in Iraq to such things is histrionic nonsense.
We still have troops in every nation that we defeated post WW1. Why would Iraq be any different, especially given all the oil that's there?
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It's a cynical attempt to try to do something to try to stop the spiraling poll numbers for him and the Democrats. Yet we're still leaving troops there--commitment is "changing," not ending--and the war in Afghanistan is bloodier than ever (worse than it was under Bush) so it's not really going to do anything. It's also an attempt to distract people from the ethics trials of two Democrats in the House.
Some pundits are predicting the biggest GOP majority since 1946. We'll see. All I know is, this Democrat supermajority fucking sucks, obsessing over socialized healthcare for a year instead of jobs. And now, our buddies in the UK are decentralizing their healthcare because the quality of their socialized healthcare sucks. Obama's whole first year was a pointless waste.
It's like the last two years have been an example of how idealistic liberalism fails in practice. Obama flies around the world apologizing to everyone for our existence to match the image of the enlightened intellectual, yet people in the rest of the world continue to hate us and are openly making nukes. Spends money on stimulus packages that do little except increase the debt, furthering our financial troubles. Constantly goes back on promises made during his campaign. And on and on.
Most people, when times are tough, tighten their belts and lower their expenses to save money until things get better. Why Obama chose to expand government and increase spending in a recession is disappointing but not surprising.
Soldiers grow back, forests don't.
You've never planted a tree? Seriously, you put a seedling in the ground when it is small, and years later you come back, and it is actually bigger. Plant a soldier and come back in a few years, and all you have is the same small stone with the name of someone's kid on it.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
http://www.2010congressionalelection.com/
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Except france!
More like almost exactly the timeline Obama campaigned on.
Iraq's oil production capabilities are around $20B/year. We're spending $300B/year on the war. There literally isn't enough oil in the ground there to pay us back for the last 7.5 years, and it would take a century even if they tried. Can we please do some basic math and stop the stupid "it's all about oil" line of attack - it makes you look like an idiot.
Do you have ESP?
How long have we maintained 40,000 troops in Korea?
You do realize that Obamacare is neither socialized nor centralized, right?
I have trained the Iraqi security forces (military and civilian) and they are pretty much not trainable by western standards. You have grown men/working professionals who don't know their right from their left. You spend one week trying to teach them military drill that takes the average 8th grader 20 minutes to master. Add a loaded rifle and an "Insha Allah" attitude, and you only make everything worse.
Granted, they have pretty severe brain-drain in that country. All the smart ones left years ago (in the 80s, then again in 1990, then yet again in the 2000s). If security ever improves, I have several friends and colleagues that would go back. The problem is, security won't improve without the likes of them returning and bringing their advanced degrees back to their homeland. It's a total "chicken-or-the-egg" conundrum.
yah but i find it very interesting that an election is right around the corner its more like he plained it to be this way
So what you're saying is... you're distrustful of America having a president who can actually plan more than a year ahead of time?
Isn't that a minimum standard we should be, if not proud of, appreciative of?
Which is also stupid. Our troops should be defending our country. And with our troops in places like South Korea, we could very well be doing more harm than good.
we should not have military bases in 130 different countries.
Obama did well on this one. Let's give him credit.
Obama did well? Obama opposed everything that allowed Iraq to be in this position now. Obama had no plan for Iraq except a campaign promise (and like all of his campaign promises, it comes with a expiration date). Bush, and Patraus more so, deserves the credit here. They put all Iraq on this path, all Obama did was follow the blueprint given to him by Bush. A plan that called for the removal of troops in late 2010. Obama had no plan of his own
To be honest I still don't understand what you were trying to say.
As a conservative I'd like to point out your argument about the Afghanistan war becoming bloodier under Obama and this surge of troops is the same argument many liberals used during the Iraq Surge. Guess what, when you send more troops in to take and hold ground and fight the enemy more troops get hurt. But that doesn't mean the strategy is a failure. It's a war, if you want to win people end up dying before that happens.
It's absofuckinglutely ridiculous that the vehement liberals razed Petraeus for the surge under the Bush administration and now the right wingers want to make the same mistake and go AGAINST the commanders on the ground just so they can bash a Dem President. Keep your political bashing out of war strategy, the lives of our troops and future of those countries is more important than scoring political points.
Tim S-
Your pithy comment might look good on a bumper sticker or t-shirt, but it's not really this same thing and we both know it. It's about as dumb as the arguments from the right "when will we stop occupying (Chicago or other city) as there are more deaths there in (time period) than Iraq.
Germany is a strategic ally and fellow NATO member. Simply having operational bases in a country is not the same as occupation. The US does not patrol the streets of Germany, nor do they perform operational missions within Germany's borders aside from training simulations. Assignment in Germany is normally a cushy job and one many soldiers hope for.
US presence in Germany was scaled back following the re-unification of the two Germanys. Early in the Clinton administration early discharge was offered to many US soldiers as a scaling back "peace dividend" (I remember this personally because my wife took the opportunity to return to civilian life). Many troops who were stationed in Germany were moved to Saudi Arabia.
Your calculation is wrong.
You assume $20B/year - $300B/year = $-280B/year
This is how the people running the war see it.
$20B/year + $300B/year (in cost plus contracts) = $320B/year = War oil is much better than regular oil!
Yea, because the Cato institute is a bastion of independent and non-partisan fact analysis. Next you'll tell me Gartner provides reports that are impartial and unbiased.
Don't forget to mention that you didn't read it.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Iraq and Afghanistan are different situations. In Afghanistan, there is actual territory being lost and won. Having extra military forces to hold our position against the Taleban advances -- yes, actual advances by the enemy -- is very useful. In Iraq, the whole country is "ours" and the enemy lives there and attacks entirely from within. There, extra troops are mostly just extra targets for surprise attacks. There's no hard line, like nothing happening in Iraq happens in Afghanistan, but for certain there are no cases in Iraq of a definable enemy swooping in and taking a town that we had previously won.
So to me, it makes a lot more sense to be critical of the "surge" in Iraq vs the "surge" in Afghanistan. Especially considering how neglected Afghanistan had been for so many years.
However, the most important and effective -- yet least talked about -- aspect of Petraeus' Iraqi surge was the attempts to engage the insurgents in general and in particular the Sunnis, basically buying them off and convincing them that Al Qaeda in Iraq was our mutual enemy (with AQ conveniently helping us out in this regard by helping Sunnis get killed). This and other efforts actually gave them the sense that they had some role in and stake in the future of Iraq. Convincing the Sunnis to stop fighting us through non-violent means did far more to decrease the violence than the extra troops did. It was a great, the kind that could have made a real difference if deployed early on in Iraq.
With Petraeus in charge, I'm hoping that in addition to the actually-helpful-cus-it's-actually-kinda-like-a-real-war troop increases, there will also be much more behind-the-scenes dealing with Taleban factions that may come around to our side. There's been talk of this in the news, and hopefully there will be real effects.
Where the hell was Petraeus when we invaded these countries?!
The enemies of Democracy are
How is it NOT socialized?
It doesn't matter. GP is being sucked into an argument which is unwinnable because the premise depends on an agreed to definition for what is an extremely ambiguous (in the U.S. at least) term.
Takes money from society as a whole and redistributes. Um, that's socialized.
You've just describe every nation that collects taxes.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
You want to save the lives of our troops? Pull them out. Right now. It's a little tough for Afghanis to kill them if they aren't in-country. Right now, they're dying for exactly one major reason: To benefit corporate interests here. They're not protecting us; and they're doing damned little for anyone in Afghanistan. They are the lever arm for the transfer of taxes from the citizens to the corporations. Nothing more. And yes, they are dying for that.
The future of those countries? What about the future of Sudan? Are we fighting for those people? No, of course we're not -- we're letting them go to hell in a hand-basket. Because its not convenient to fight there. Don't fool yourself into thinking that we're in Afghanistan "for the future of Afghanistan." We're there to engage in war where we can make an adequate excuse to the naive: chasing down the "terr'ists." It's not about saving Afghani citizens from themselves. If it was, we'd be in Sudan, actually we would have been in Sudan first. Not to mention a host of other countries.
Speaking (mostly) as a conservative myself, if we had actually wanted to solve the problem we would have:
The 9/11 terrorists were primarily Saudi; they were primarily funded by Saudis; they were entirely Islamic in creed and goals; and the one place we did absolutely nothing? Saudi Arabia. Instead, we attacked a secular country - Iraq - for the most transparent of reasons, to control the oil, a goal we did in fact achieve. If you want to know why we're at war, follow the money. It'll tell you, every time. It had *zero* to do with 9/11, except as a sop to the naive. Afghanistan... the same.
In the meantime, the Saudis have religious fanatic Islamites running all over the country like cockroaches, as an actual enforcement arm of the Sharia; women are treated as property (and girls are treated worse.) And again, we're not in there, nor are we going to be, helping the people or straightening out the system the way they like to make you think we "are" in Afghanistan.
We are not engaged in any just wars. And despite the injury it would do to the military industrial complex, we should get the fuck out of both Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday at the latest. If we were moral and ethical about the use of our military, that is. But we're not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Socialism by dictionary definition involves state ownership of the means of production so there is no real socialism in the world today except in a handful of weirdo countries like North Korea, Cuba and Belarus. When the right in the US accuse someone of being socialist they mean that they sort of lean towards the bigger government involvement in x as opposed to leaving x to the free market. So if you take it literally, it doesn't make sense. I personally would prefer if people used the word statist instead of socialist to describe people like Obama.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Rachel Maddow made some interesting points on her week in Afghanistan a few weeks back. Some things I hadn't heard or read elsewhere.
1) The distribution of wealth is nonexistent in Afghanistan. All the war money is making a few Afghan nationals wealthy. There's a great clip of her walking with Richard Engel outside of these huge gaudy mansions. The mansions were all built by folks who got rich off of the war. Yet the streets outside them are unpaved, and there are trash heaps everywhere and open sewers. Government services are nonexistent even in this neighborhood full of mini-castles.
2) Although the war has dragged on, and we haven't made much progress since 2002 / 2003ish, much of the blame may lie in the fact that the U.S. was distracted by, and had vital resources diverted to Iraq. Much more progress in training the Afghans has apparently been made in the past year than the previous five years. Lots of mistakes were made in the prior years, in both training, counterinsurgency strategy, and general winning of hearts and minds.
The biggest question behind the second point is "is it too late now?". Let's assume for a minute that the folks Maddow talked to are right. We now have the secret sauce that eluded us for years under bush. We now know what to do in Afghanistan, where as before, we just hadn't figured it out yet. If we could go back in time and tell ourselves this plan in 2002, I'm sure this would be helpful. But that's not the case. We now have to implement this plan, not under a blank slate as we had in 2002, but in a country that's been occupied by us for 8+ years now. With all the bitterness and resentment that comes from all the mistakes we made in the past.
If we have the secret formula, can it work, or has the public opinion of the Afghan population turned so far as to be irreversible?
There's one more interesting thing, also from Richard Engel on Maddow's program. This is an exchange from October 9, 2009:
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
No military force has ever walked away from Afghanistan as a winner.Not Alexander the Great, not the British Empire, not Russia nor will the U.S.. The only winners are those that just walk away.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Taking people's income to pay for government services is exactly what every civilization has done since we moved out of the caves.
Were we still living in caves in 1913? Because that's when the 16th amendment was ratified and the income tax established.
I could have sworn I'd seen pictures of people living in houses, apartments, etc. in the 19th century, but I'm sure you'll enlighten me.
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